Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Darjeeling Limited
2007 · Wes Anderson · The Darjeeling Limited on Sightlines
A man in a suit is running for a train, and he is going to miss it. The camera runs beside him in slow motion while a younger man in gray overtakes him, swings up onto the moving carriage, and is gone. The runner left on the platform is Bill Murray, the most familiar face Wes Anderson had at his disposal, handed thirty seconds and a missed connection. Then the train pulls out and the film begins doing the thing it will keep doing for ninety minutes. The brothers sit down. India starts to move.
That reversal is the whole film, and it is also a specific idea. Deleuze calls it the movement of world: instead of a character crossing a world that holds still for them, the character goes still and the world takes over the moving. He found it in musicals, where the dance stops being something the dancer does and becomes something that carries them off. Anderson builds an entire feature on it, and he does it with logistics rather than effects. The production leased a working train from Indian Railways, repainted it, dressed the carriages as sets, and shot on live track through Rajasthan with the cast living aboard. So the light in the compartments shifts because the sun really is sliding past the windows, and the country behind Owen Wilson's head is not a plate. The Whitmans are not traveling. They are being conveyed.
Hold onto that, because the standing complaint about this film is that its India is decor. The Deleuzian reading doesn't dismiss the charge. It says the form is the charge, on purpose. Francis has booked a pilgrimage using laminated itineraries prepared by an assistant. He has scheduled his own transformation. What arrives is scenery at forty miles an hour.
The compartments are barely wider than the actors, and Robert Yeoman shoots them the way he shoots everything for Anderson: dead frontal, walls parallel to the sensor, the camera turning in right angles. Deleuze's term for this is the closed set, the frame treated as a system in which nothing is accidental and everything present has been chosen. Few filmmakers close a frame as hard as Anderson does. Here the closure is the subject rather than the manner. Late in the film a long lateral track glides past the compartments and finds each character in turn, the mother, the ex-girlfriend, the steward, the businessman from the platform, laid out like a doll's house in cross-section while The Kinks' "Strangers" plays. Separate boxes, one vehicle. Whatever connects these people is being produced by the camera, not by them. It is the most beautiful shot in the movie and it is an argument against its own characters.
Deleuze's account of what happened to cinema after 1945 is a list of symptoms, and two of them show up in the first reel. One is the voyage form, the trip that transforms nothing, where an itinerary stands in for a plot and the plot stands in for a change. The other is consciousness of clichés, people moving among worn images and half knowing it. The eleven pieces of monogrammed luggage the brothers drag across Rajasthan belonged to their dead father, and the baggage-as-baggage joke is so obvious that Anderson eventually makes it literal: they throw the bags into the dirt to run for a train. He stages it as a joke about how obvious it is, which is the only thing that lets the image survive.
Then the film breaks. Thrown off the train, the brothers come across three boys at a river, one for each of them, and the crossing goes wrong. They go into the water. They get two out. The third comes up the bank dead. This is the crisis of the action-image turning up inside a comedy. The circuit that ran nearly all of studio cinema — a man perceives a situation, acts, and the situation resolves — is engaged at full strength and fails to close. The death is real. The brothers' grief, up to this point, has had a schedule.
What follows is the best sequence in the film and the least Andersonian. At the village funeral the brothers have nothing to do. Irrfan Khan, as the drowned boy's father, is almost wordless. The symmetry comes apart, the camera goes onto a shoulder, the ambient track is left unmixed. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations, moments where a character, and we with them, can only look and listen because no action is available, and he calls the figure they produce the seer. Three Americans stand at the edge of somebody else's grief and watch it happen. The handheld grammar is a direct debt: it is the register of Louis Malle's Phantom India, which is where Anderson found permission to point a camera at a real place without composing it first.
And then the film does what a stalled recognition does. Bergson, Deleuze's source here, distinguished two recognitions. Normally you recognize a thing by using it, automatically, and move on. When that fails, attention hangs, and consciousness goes looking in memory instead. The village funeral will not be absorbed. It reaches, and the film cuts back to New York a year earlier, to their father's funeral. It is the only recollection-image in the movie, a dated block of former present, and Andrew Weisblum sets it in as a single structurally isolated slab. Deleuze thought the flashback a weak instrument, a picture of time still governed by the present that summons it. That weakness is exactly right here. These men keep their past as a sealed unit they have agreed not to open. The film's argument comes out of it: ritual works when it isn't booked in advance.
The objects have been working underneath all along. The father's sunglasses, his razor, his car keys, his Porsche. Deleuze's fetish is the part-object a drive fastens onto, and Peter is stealing a dead man's belongings and wearing his glasses while dreading his own fatherhood. The luggage is the film's symbol, the single object condensing the whole relation, inheritance as literal freight with animals drawn on the sides. The brothers' three defenses read as symptoms of one absence: Francis laminating, Peter hoarding, Jack turning the family into publishable fiction while insisting he invented every word of it.
Which brings up the hardest thing here. There is no original score, and the Indian music is mostly music from Indian movies — cues Satyajit Ray wrote for Charulata and Days and Nights in the Forest, Shankar-Jaikishan's "Typewriter, Tip Tip Tip" out of Merchant Ivory's Bombay Talkie. Deleuze's name for an image that assembles its object and then stands in for it is crystalline description. Anderson's India is described out of other films, and the film admits it, dedicating itself to Ray. The debts are structural rather than decorative. Renoir's The River supplies the model: a Western family's private grief staged in flat frontal color with ritual river life running behind it. Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest supplies the architecture, city men going to the country to improve themselves and producing vanity and bickering. Bombay Talkie supplies the trick of cutting a Hindi production number against Western emotional deadlock so the borrowed song carries the feeling the dialogue refuses. Shakespeare Wallah supplies the working register, Anglophone performers, rail travel, Ray's music again.
Naming the crystal does not get the film off. Jonah Weiner's "Unbearable Whiteness" made that charge stick in 2007, and a description that has replaced its object is a serviceable definition of what he was pointing at. What the film can honestly claim is that it stages the substitution rather than concealing it, and then lets an actual child's death break the frame it has been so careful about.
What it did to filmmaking is smaller and real. The most controlled stylist in American cinema bought total command of one object and accepted contingency everywhere outside it, which is not how he had ever worked. Weisblum's cutting came in brisker and more elliptical than the chaptered formality of The Royal Tenenbaums; scenes end early, incidents jump like entries in a travel diary, and that grammar stayed — he has cut every Anderson feature since. And Hotel Chevalier went out free on iTunes before the feature opened, a first act delivered in a different medium, an experiment in 2007 and unremarkable now.
Watch it again for the windows. The brothers barely move under their own power the entire film. The country does the moving, the schedule does the deciding, the luggage does the remembering. Then at the very end they drop the bags and run, and it is the first motion in the movie that belongs to them, and Anderson gives it about four seconds, deadpan, as though it were nothing at all.
Concepts in play
- Movement of world — The production leased a working train and shot on live track through Rajasthan: the brothers sit still in frontal compartment tableaux while real landscape and shifting sunlight move past the windows behind them.
- The closed set (cadre) — Yeoman's planimetric frontal compositions in compartments barely wider than the actors, culminating in the late lateral tracking shot past the compartments to "Strangers" — separate boxes in cross-section, connection produced by the camera rather than the people.
- Voyage/balade form — Francis's laminated itinerary of scheduled spiritual stops, described in the dossier as a machine for producing disappointment; the picaresque structure transforms nothing it was booked to transform.
- Consciousness of clichés — The luggage-as-baggage metaphor is so unsubtle the film makes it literal — the brothers drop the bags to run for a train — and Anderson stages it as a joke about how obvious it is.
- Crisis of the action-image — Thrown off the train, the brothers act decisively to save three boys from the river and fail to save one; the sensory-motor circuit is engaged at full strength and does not resolve the situation.
- Pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The village funeral, where the locked-off symmetry gives way to shoulder-carried camera and raw unmixed ambient track, and the brothers have no available action — the register borrowed from Malle's Phantom India.
- The seer (voyant) — The three brothers stand at the edge of the drowned boy's funeral as watchers; Irrfan Khan's nearly wordless father anchors the sequence while they can only look on.
- Two recognitions (attentive recognition) — The village funeral cannot be absorbed by habit; recognition stalls and the film reaches into memory instead, triggering the retreat to the father's funeral in New York.
- Recollection-image (mnemosign) — Weisblum sets the New York funeral flashback in as a single structurally isolated block — the film's one moment of sustained temporal retreat and its withheld emotional key.
- Fetish (part-object) — The father's sunglasses, razor, car keys and Porsche circulate as charged relics; Peter is stealing his father's possessions and wearing his glasses while dreading his own fatherhood.
- Symbol — The eleven matching pieces of monogrammed luggage condense the film's organizing relation — patrimony as literal freight, everything carried either inherited or bought as a souvenir.
- Symptom — Francis's laminated plans, Peter's hoarding and Jack's conversion of the family into fiction are three defenses against the same absence; the dossier names control itself as a symptom.
- Crystalline description — There is no original score: the film's Indian music comes from Indian cinema — Ray's cues for Charulata and Days and Nights in the Forest, Shankar-Jaikishan from Bombay Talkie — so the India onscreen is assembled out of other films and stands in for its object, a substitution the dedication to Ray declares openly.